Trusting the Billionaire

Chapter Six: Girls chat

Audrey left the club flustered, the night air doing nothing to cool the heat crawling up her neck. Angry, that was the word for it, except she couldn't pin down exactly what she was angry about. Marshall, obviously. But which part of Marshall? The way he'd ruined her night just by existing in the same room? The infuriating calm he wore like it was tailored for him too, same as everything else he put on? Or the audacity, the sheer audacity of asking if she was alright, as though he weren't the reason her entire week had unraveled in the first place?

Why would he even ask that? Why would he put himself in the position of concerned bystander when he was the storm she was trying to survive? It didn't make sense, and the not-making-sense of it needled at her more than she wanted to admit.

She had done so well, too. Days of carefully not thinking about him, filing him away under "problem to solve later", and then he'd shown up. Not just shown up, appeared, unannounced, like he had some divine right to occupy whatever room she happened to be standing in. And of course he hadn't shown up looking anything less than devastating. That was the part that really irritated her. He could have at least had the decency to look ordinary.

He hadn't. He'd had his suit jacket off, sleeves loose over his forearms, just a plain dress shirt with the top button undone, the kind of casual that should have made him look like any other man out for a drink. It hadn't. If anything, it made him more appealing. She could still see it when she closed her eyes: the clean line of his throat, the small stretch of skin at his collar that he never let anyone see in the boardroom, the way his shoulders filled out the fabric like the shirt had been cut with the express purpose of proving a point. It wasn't the suits that made him look like that. She understood that now, annoyingly. He wasn't dressed by his tailor's genius. His tailor was working with what he'd already been given.

It wasn't fair. Powerful men were supposed to be either handsome or terrifying, not both, not stitched together so seamlessly that she couldn't find the seam to pull apart and hate properly.

By the time she got home, she didn't even bother turning on the hallway light. She kicked off her heels somewhere near the door, left her bag on the counter, and dropped onto her bed still half-dressed, staring at the ceiling like it owed her an explanation. Her mind ran laps, the loan portfolios, the board meeting Marshall had asked for, the two weeks he'd given himself to decide, the ridiculous, impossible condition he'd laid on the table like it was a footnote and not the entire plot twist of her life. "Pretend to be my fiancée." As if that were a small thing. As if she hadn't spent the last five days turning the phrase over and over until it lost all meaning, the way a word does when you say it too many times.

She thought about Halden Cross's name, mentioned only once but heavy enough to explain everything, why Marshall needed this to look personal, why he needed a woman on his arm and not just a signature on a contract. She thought about her father, about Bellamy Trust, about the fact that turning Marshall down outright might be the very thing that let the bank slip through her fingers the way it had nearly slipped through her father's.

She didn't know when exactly she fell asleep. One moment she was cataloguing every reason to say no, and the next, morning light was cutting thin lines across her ceiling and her phone was buzzing insistently against the nightstand.

It was Tracy. Of course it was Tracy, barely ten in the morning, and already fully alert in a way that felt like a personal attack against anyone still laying horizontal.

"Please tell me you're awake," Tracy said the second the call connected, no greeting, no mercy.

"I am now," Audrey mumbled, dragging a pillow over her face and immediately regretting it, the pillow smelled like the club, like smoke and perfume and, faintly, something that might have been cedar and might have been her imagination working overtime.

"Good. Because we need to talk about last night. Specifically, we need to talk about Mr. King."

Audrey groaned, low and long, the sound of a woman who already knew where this conversation was headed and had no intention of enjoying the ride. "There is nothing to talk about."

"There is "everything" to talk about." Tracy's voice had that particular lift it got when she was thoroughly, gleefully unbothered by someone else's suffering. "That man is an eye candy, Audrey. Certified. I don't care what you say about his personality, he is every woman's dream."

"Every woman's dream indeed," Audrey repeated flatly, sitting up against her headboard, "then he should pick any of those women to be blackmailed into a fake engagement."

"Okay, but hear me out; the way he handled that guy on the dance floor? Gentlemanly. I mean it. He didn't have to step in like that, and he didn't make a whole scene out of it either, he just—" Tracy made a small, appreciative noise. "That was hot, is what I'm saying."

"It was a show," Audrey shot back, more sharply than she meant to. "He likes an audience. He likes being the calm one while everyone else falls apart. It wasn't gentlemanly, it was, it was showing off."

"Uh-huh." Tracy did not sound convinced. "And is that also why you called him Marshall twice last night?"

Audrey froze mid-reach for the glass of water on her nightstand. "I did not."

"You did. two times. Very naturally too, like it just, slipped right out." Audrey could hear the grin in her voice, could picture it exactly, Tracy's eyebrows halfway up her forehead. "I thought you two were supposed to be on strictly last name terms."

"It's a name, Tracy. I know his name. That doesn't mean anything."

"Sure, sure. First-name basis already, though. That was fast, even for a fake fiancée arrangement that hasn't technically started yet."

"I never said I was going to accept—"

"Which brings me," Tracy interrupted, suddenly serious in the way that meant she'd been building to this the entire call, "to the actual point. Audrey. Think about it. Really think about it, not just the panic version where your brain shuts off the second his name comes up."

Audrey pulled her knees up, resting her chin on them, phone tucked against her shoulder. "I'm listening."

"You have nothing to lose here. That's the part you keep skipping over. You're not looking for love in this, right? You've told me a hundred times you don't want what your parents had; that whole cold, going-through-the-motions thing, two people who couldn't wait to get divorced. You don't want a marriage like that built on real feelings that turn sour. So what does it matter if this one starts as a contract?"

"Because it's still my life, Tracy. It's still my name attached to a lie."

"It's a business arrangement with better paperwork," Tracy said simply. "And unlike most contract marriages, you actually get to write the terms. The way I see it he needs you more than you need him right now don't forget that part. You get to set the conditions. Money, privacy, an exit clause, whatever you want. When has any woman in a fake-dating storyline ever gotten to negotiate from that kind of position?"

Audrey opened her mouth to argue and found, annoyingly, that she didn't have an immediate counter.

"And honestly," Tracy went on, gentler now, "think of it as a rehearsal. You get to practice being someone's partner, the appearances, the whole performance of it, without any of the risk of actually losing your heart to the wrong person. Then when your real person shows up, whenever that is, you'll already know what you don't want. Sounds almost useful, if you ask me."

Audrey stared at the ceiling again, at the same thin lines of light, and let out a slow breath. "I hate that you're making sense right now."

"I'm always making sense. You just don't want to hear it because it means admitting the eye-candy billionaire wasn't wrong to ask you to think it over."

"I'm hanging up."

"You're not denying it, though."

"Goodbye, Tracy."

"Think about it!" Tracy sang out, right before the call cut off, and Audrey was left sitting in the quiet of her room, phone loose in her hand, the morning light doing nothing to make the decision in front of her any easier — or any less inevitable.

She didn't have an answer yet. But for the first time since Marshall King had laid his condition on the table, she let herself sit with the possibility instead of running from it.

She would think about it. That much, at least, she could promise.